The Heart Facing Mine
by Nagia
Summary: Yuffie tries to explain the inexplicable. Compilation Canon, VxY, ensemble piece.


**The Heart Facing Mine**

* * *

"Why Vincent, brat?"

The question is a whiskey-dry half-mumble voiced around a lit cigarette. His cig's glowing tip is a cherry-bright spark in the dark hangar, vivid like the red of a stranger's candy.

Yuffie doesn't even need to think before answering.

"Because he looked better than I did in my bridesmaid dress."

The immediate reply is shocked silence. Then again, given both their natures, the silence quickly gives way beneath his disbelieving belly laugh. He guffaws because the idea is too ridiculous.

But later, in the quiet, she hears him murmur, "I did _not_ need to know that."

She never tells him if she was being serious—no, she's never serious, so actually she never tells him whether what she said was true or not.

And she never tells Cid about the razor-sharp wit, dry as all south Wutai's deserts, and how much fun it is to watch him turn it on other people. Never tells him how absolutely fucking hilarious he can be when he takes himself seriously. No. _Because_ he takes himself seriously. Never condenses the nonsense half-joke/half-answer she gave him to, "Because he makes me laugh."

* * *

"Why him, princess?"

The question is really _Why him but not me?_ and it's saddled with baggage she doesn't want to deal with.

She looks up, sharply, meets his eyes across the distance and darkness of night-lit office. Outside the windows, Edge sprawls and twinkles, nowhere near as serene as Wutai, nor as purposeful as Junon, and certainly not the frenetic energy everyone always said Midgar had.

Midgar is the one place on this planet she has never been, has never wanted to be.

"Because he thinks anchovies are, like, the Planet's ultimate curse to mankind. Well, besides himself. He probably thinks he's worse than anchovies, but anchovies are pretty far down on his list."

She does not say: because he never would have asked me that. Because he never tried to teach me to drink coffee and you never stopped me from finding out what happens when you smash a shotgun cartridge with a hammer. He's himself. You're you. Leave it alone.

* * *

Tifa's a strange bundle of wisdom and not-wisdom. In the dim lighting of her bar, while Marlene and Denzel stomp around upstairs, the glint in Tifa's red-brown eyes is knowing. In the background, Yuffie hears the children declaiming things about Balthier the Moogle and the Midgar Zolom (which will detour, she's sure, into whether or not the Midgar Zolom was real, because Denzel's a city boy, when all's said and done), but the background isn't nearly as important as the quirk of Tifa's plump lower lip that spells curiosity with a capital Talk To Me.

"So," she says, the curve of her lip going from curious to somewhere between knowing and curious and wicked, "tell me why."

Yuffie shrugs, dusts a washrag through a long, thin glass. "Because he doesn't know the Chocarena and he thinks Elixir-bombing is a medical thing."

Tifa raises an eyebrow at the mention of Elixir-bombing. "You've gotten him to try that?"

She only grins, cheerful at her prospects. "Nope, but we're working our way up from sake-bombs."

And that's the end of it.

Tifa knows better than to expect a straight answer, even while asking the question.

* * *

Nanaki's dry, amused grin is doglike on his face. He's sitting neatly on his haunches, uncanny intelligence glittering in his eyes as his gaze roves from Yuffie to the Cosmo Candle to Vincent and back to Yuffie again.

They don't say anything about it until later, of course, when the Candle is a pool of ash with winking embers peeking out, and everyone else has stumbled off to the inn. Yuffie watches Cid and Barret trace their too-careful ways along the red cliffside paths, but despite their unsteady movements, they disappear safely.

"Hey," she says, but he whuffs out a low chuckle, and she chuckles with him.

"When did it start?"

Yuffie rolls her eyes. "Sometime between the day we met and last week."

He looks over at her. His grin widens until it's wicked. "You two always did get along better than anyone thought you would."

"Yeah, well, he's the only one of you who ever figured out that I'm always right!"

It's a total lie, of course. But it's a fun lie, told with an actual smile and no mockery.

"Of course," he says. His voice is serious, like he believes her, but the amusement hasn't left his expression.

She and Nanaki know each other well enough, with starburst flashes of recognition and the slow, smooth thoroughness of puzzle pieces clicking together, that they don't always need words. He asks his questions soundlessly, through the faint night sounds of the Canyon, through the heat-shimmering red glow of the Candle's dying sparks, through the distant glitter of the sky-but above all, through the tilt of his head, the way one ear has swiveled fully toward her, and the calculating green-gold cat's eye shine of his unblinking stare in the night.

So she answers him.

"You know what he keeps in his wallet?" This, she found out recently and without his permission, and she makes a snitching motion, her hand darting into an imaginary pocket and then retreating, to tell him so. "Some old money, one of Marlene's school pictures, a bullet casing, and a list of not sucky materia set-ups I wrote for him when we were in Gongaga and I was bored."

Nanaki's quiet for a long, long moment. It's not a direct answer to the question he pointedly didn't ask, but he doesn't call on her on it.

"That tells me as much about you as it does about him."

"Don't make me hit you."

He only laughs, completely unafraid. He rises to his feet, stretching his entire body out, and pads away toward the cliffs, his steps as silent as any other predator's. His tail is a flickering candle-flame in the darkness.

* * *

"You must have really respected him," the other woman said, her eyes sharp behind her glasses.

In reply, Yuffie snickered, and the snicker turned into a breathless laugh that rose from the bottom of her chest. Respect? That ridiculous, cape-wearing, pain-wallowing vampire-wannabe who was doing that whole Wandering The World In Penance thing?

As if. No, Cloud respected him. Tifa and Cid and Barret and Reeve and Red respected him.

She _saw_ him. Saw the guilt, the blood, the steel, the collapse, and was going to see the rebuild if she had to take one of Cid's terrifying motorized wrenches to him.

Shalua shook her head, smiling too. "I should know better than that, shouldn't I?"

"Yeah," said Yuffie, who everyone knew respected no one and nothing except for what Wutai had once been and would be again, "you totally should."

And she tried not to think about that long moment she had stared at Vincent, once Cid had cut her down from Da Chao and she had returned their materia, her heart freezing in her chest as she told them all, "No matter what anyone says, I'm going with you!"

Shalua held up her hand in a half-placating gesture, accent clipped and professional but with the barest of gentle undertones, "I promise I won't make that mistake again."

Back then, Cid's lip had curled, and Barret had scowled, while Cloud had looked at her, serious and stern and unreadable. Aerith and Tifa both stared at her as if her eyes held answers, or hidden truths, or some cosmic sign that said This Girl Should Be In Avalanche that could be read if they just looked long and hard enough.

But Vincent had looked at her, had closed his eyes, looking inward, and then given her a single silent nod.

Yuffie only smiled, something a little tender in the wicked wide curve of her lips.

Respect, huh?

* * *

"Why me?"

His voice is slow, deep, meaningful, with just a touch of a dry tone. The sound of his voice is naturally solemn enough to make the question sound like he's given up trying to figure out just how badly he fucked up his karma to be saddled with her and is asking the gods instead.

She knows that's only a little of what he means. They're both different enough that living together isn't easy.

Yuffie takes her time before she answers. Acknowledges the deep, purring, sleepy voice and the mussed hair, the tired expression and the pallor, the curve of his good arm and the sharp high angle of his cheekbones. Reflects on how unintentionally hilarious he is, on his perverse sense of honor, on the pain he wallowed in and the ass he kicked once he figured himself out, on the romantic idealism that wars with cynical acceptance of the world as it is and was and will be.

"Because I love you."

The tension in his face softens. His lips retreat just a little from their firm line; the narrow set of his eyes relaxes. Otherwise, he remains just as stony and impassive as ever.

But with that expression, he doesn't need to say it back.

* * *

She only asks herself once.

And the answer is this:

Somewhere, a man with a mind that focuses only on the moment and maybe, sometimes, the next paycheck carefully loads a gun, among the first made by Shinra Arms Manufacturing Corporation, as he prepares for a day in the Department of Administrative Research.

(Somewhere, a girl scrapes a whetstone along a steel edge, remembering splendor and honor, the blessing of a dragon-river and the bounty of stars that fit warm and snug in a monk's palm, and vows to bring it all back.)

Somewhere, a man in love with the mother of her country's nightmare monster relates twenty-year-old history to a bunch of people who don't know him from V. L. Price.

(Somewhere, a girl watches defeat sap her father's spine and leave the eyes of her country shadowed and downcast.)

Somewhere, a man cracks a very bad joke about his own eventual demise, complete with creepy laugh.

(Somewhere, a girl says, glibly nonchalant and perfectly serious, "I found you looking all corpselike in Shinra Manor. So I saved you.")

Somewhere, he swishes his cape dramatically and doesn't realize just how ridiculous it makes him look. He's too focused on being a monster.

(Somewhere, she laughs, long and manic and loud, but watches a crackling campfire and weary friends, and thinks of the materia palmed into her gear.)

Somewhere, a man runs up the steep cliffside paths of an engraved mountain, fury thundering through his veins but never telling him who he's angriest at, for the sake of a girl who stole from him.

(Somewhere, she lifts a bleeding body, robbed of a dark-shining star and entangled in crimson wool that unspools beneath him, and shouts that he's an idiot; he's not allowed to die like this.)

Somewhere, there's a bright golden coin flipping lazily in the sunlight. Each side alike, each side different.

And that coin keeps flipping, only to be caught in a tanned palm, trapped between ostentatious fingers and then vanished into thin air, right before a bemused monster's blood red eyes.

* * *

The heart facing mine is a clear reflecting pool

**—**Hijikata Toshizou


End file.
